October 31, 2012

My earliest memory from inside a movie theater is watching Princess Leia dissing Luke Skywalker for being too short to convincingly impersonate a stormtrooper. I always remember the scene differently from how it was actually shot: some how, my 3 year old brain knitted together the stark black and whites from the hallways of the Death Star with this scene, so I always remember what is actually an all-black room as a high contrast black & white.

Weird, I know. Maybe it was just a bit of information overload for my developing cranium.

Point being, while I'm a much more rabid Trekkie than Star Wars fan, I basically know the dialogue from Episode IV by heart.

I remember when the Star Wars movies were good. Sadly, there's the kernel of a good story in the most recent trilogy, but the difference, as always, is in the storytelling details - the everyday choices made by a director on dialogue, on performance, on camera position, on edits. SOMEONE could have made "The Phantom Menace", "Attack of the Clones", and "Revenge of the Sith" into good movies.

There was a time that the film snob in me completely dismissed the idea of someone else making Star Wars movies because they're really George Lucas' magnum opus, but clearly George Lucas doesn't agree with me, and he's probably right.

So, my thoughts?

Hire JJ Abrams and Damon Lindelof. Unlike me, they really do froth at the mouth about Star Wars. And my namesake has gone on record on more than one occasion about why this whole Mitichlorians garbage completely defeats the entire point about The Force. A great starting place.

Do as many things practically and in camera as you can. The CGI is killing the dramatic tension of the action and it's distracting from the drama.